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<title>Things That Sailors Lose by LookingForDroids</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22900258">Things That Sailors Lose</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids'>LookingForDroids</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Dubious Consent, F/F, Fade to Black, Monsters, POV Second Person, Past Rape/Non-con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 12:29:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22900258</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Mindfang has one last encounter with a woman she thought lost. This time, her position is not nearly so advantageous.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>The Dolorosa/Spinneret Mindfang</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Things That Sailors Lose</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Your first, mindless thought, when you open the door to the tower block that the E%ile has set aside for you and pale radiance spills out, is that you forgot to turn out the lights when you left that evening. Stupid. You don’t forget such things. Your hand is already closing around the grip of your gun, and you’re already firing, by the time your mind catches up to your vision. The lambent figure waiting by the window doesn’t move. The bolt burns through her thoracic struts and the chair she’s sitting on, sears the wall behind her. She winces a little, touches the hole where her bloodpusher used to be and smiles.</p><p>She cannot be alive. She <i>isn’t</i> alive. She is sea-drenched, salt-ruined, emaciated – and despite all that, elegant still, with her hands folded primly in her lap, her chin raised with a composure that ignites and infuriates you. You remember her pliant, sweetly flushed and grateful, and how hot her skin had been when she shivered beneath your touch, suffused with jade warmth. But death works its changes on everyone, and so does the sea, and you don’t care to think, right now, of blood. You’re not yet ready to admit that the thing lodged like a fishhook in your throat is fear.</p><p>“Where is he?” she asks – each word precise, as though she has been practicing for a long time how they will sound when she finally speaks them.</p><p>“The hive’s master?” you ask, desultory. “I hardly care. Still crying over his treachery, I’m sure.” You’re bored with him. You have been for sweeps. That doesn’t mean you’ll give him up to a dead slave’s appetites. But she shakes her head, her once-sleek hair dripping seawater onto her shoulders, and says, “I have no quarrel with the E%ile. Where is my murderer?”</p><p>“Dead,” you say. “Not by my claws, more’s the pity. I’d have torn him open from throat to nook for what he did to you.”</p><p>You mean it. You mean every single bitter word of it, and everything words are too shallow to say, because you cared for her, and because you look out for what belongs to you – as she had once, and could again, with only a little effort on your part. Perhaps she’s not so sweet as she had been, nor prone to trembling; the Orphaner took that from you, and deserves every pain he’s suffered for it. But she’ll clean up prettily all the same, and oh, you’d like to see those teeth buried in the throats of your enemies. You’ll be good to her, you decide. So much kinder than you had been before.</p><p>You reach out to her mind and find it bright and smooth, still easily touched but seamless where it had been permeable; what had been a door is now a wall, and as you search for cracks, the hook in your throat twists a little deeper. </p><p>“I don’t think you can do that to me any longer,” she says, but you’re still trying, battering against the surface of her mind even as she rises to her feet. You’d forgotten how tall she is, or perhaps never noticed at all, when she was in the habit of walking with her head bowed. She stands a full head above you, now; to look her in the eye, you have to bare your throat.</p><p>“Which means,” she muses, touching the edges of the wound in her chest, where her gown and her flesh have blackened and curled away, “that some of this is mine.”</p><p>You raise your gun again, and she moves without warning, knocking the weapon from your grasp and across the block. She grips the lapels of your coat in both hands, and you find yourself pushed back against the wall, not roughly but with uncompromising force. Her brightness fills your vision, and there is no time to think of anything but how much it will hurt when she kills you.</p><p>She doesn’t kill you, though her pupils are wide and dark, when she looks you over, with what you know must be hunger. She toys with the top button of your coat, and the next, undoing each in disquieting echo of your first meeting. If you could touch her mind again, you’d know whether or not it was meant as mockery, but all you have to go on is instinct and the sense that some part of her is still yours. You miss her warmth. You miss the ease with which she bent to your will and your touch, open as any plucked flower – but now her hand is beneath your shirt, skimming over the scars from your first molting and all the many you’ve earned since then, and you can feel yourself moving as she once had, responding to the weight and promise of her hips pressed against your own.</p><p>Her claws catch on your belt buckle, undoing it, and you hiss and grip her ruined gown, rocking forward as her hand slips down between your legs. She doesn’t want to kill you, then – not yet. You don’t want to kill her. She’s too dangerous to live: a threat to you, a threat to others. You have more weapons than your mind and your gun; you can be patient, catch her up again in the web she never quite slipped free of. You tell yourself this, and she smiles.</p><p>“I know you, Mindfang,” she says. “There’s a story in your head right now of a monster – cruel, rapacious, ever-hungry – and a hero charged by fate to cull it, and you’re sure that only one of them will make it out alive. I thought the same, when I saw you again. But you know – ”</p><p>She cups your cheek in her other hand, tilting your face up, and you brace for pain – but it’s only a kiss, in the end, and one without fangs, gentle as a betrayal.</p><p>“<i>He</i> believed that even monsters deserve mercy.”</p>
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